Speculative Fiction Writer

Friends & Colleagues

I’ve had the privilege of conversing and working with many writers over the years. Though far from an complete list, these are some of the talented authors that I’ve come to meet, know, and respect over the course of studies.

“Chloe Clark is an MFA candidate at Iowa State University. She also is an award-winning published writer of fiction and poetry as well as the author of a series of never-to-be-published screenplays with increasingly terrible taglines. She is a notriously good baker and chef of vegetarian cusine, as well as notoriously obnoxious. She enjoys a good pint with a cupcake. Sometimes, those pints are of coffee… Sometimes they are good old Stout or limoncello.”

“Alyssa Wong is a Nebula-, Shirley Jackson-, Bram Stoker-, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author, shark aficionado, and 2013 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static, among others. She is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University and a member of the Manhattan-based writing group Altered Fluid, and can be found on Twitter as @crashwong.”

“Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is winner of the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize for his book River Hymns. Daye is a Cave Canem fellow and longtime member of the editorial staff at Raleigh Review. He received his MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Nashville Review, and has poems in Four Way Review and forthcoming in Ploughshares. Daye recently won the Amy Clampitt Residency for 2018 and The Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award for his poems in the Fall 2015 issue.”

“Julie (she/sometimes they) was born in Parkton, Maryland, and now resides in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University. She attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2014. Her work appears in Terraform, Escape Pod, and PodCastle.”

“Diana was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. She received her masters in creative writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her past adventures include: nonprofit marketing and event coordinating at Family Gateway, social media and marketing for a personal injury law firm, interning at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, interning at the Lark Play Development Center and earning her bachelors at the strange and awesome Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. “

“Lindsay Tigue writes poetry and fiction and has work published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, PassagesNorth, CutBank, Moon City Review,Rattle, and LIT,among others. She was a 2013 Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference and won the 2012 Indiana Review 1/2 K Prize. Her poetry manuscript,System of Ghosts, was recently a finalist in the 2013 Philip Levine Prize and the 2013 Noemi Press Book Award for Poetry.”

“Tegan Nia Swanson is a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment Program at Iowa State University, where she was the 2011 Pearl Hogrefe Fellow. Her fiction appears in Ecotone, Bellingham Review, and Connu, and she was a finalist for the 2014 Fiction Fellowships at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Born and raised in Minnesota, Tegan has also found home in Madison, WI, Washington D.C., the Pacific coast of Ecuador, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). “

“Geetha Iyer received an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University in 2014. Her writing includes fiction inOrion and Gulf Coast, and poetry forthcoming in Ninth Letterand the Mid-American Review, among others. Recognition for her work includes the James Wright Poetry Award, the Calvino Prize, theGulf Coast Fiction Prize, and a work-study scholarship for the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She grew up in the United Arab Emirates.”

“John Linstrom is a writer, doctoral student, teacher, Michigander, and occasional Liberty Hyde Bailey impersonator. He writes and publishes poetry and nonfiction prose, and has recently begun work on a PhD in English at New York University. But in this urban space, he remains haunted by the same Liberty Hyde Bailey whom he occasionally impersonated in Michigan, and by the small hometown of South Haven which they both shared some 150 years apart.”

“Brenna Dixon is a native Floridian with an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University, where she teaches eco-composition, composition with a focus on monster narratives, and fiction writing. Her fiction and nonfiction can be found in Steel Toe Review, South Dakota Review, Burrow Press Review, and other journals. She sometimes also writes slam poetry about fruit.”

“Andrew Payton writes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and has work published or forthcoming inMeridian, Greensboro Review, Masters Review, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, andNotre Dame Review, among other journals and magazines. His poem “Bad May” won the 2013 James Hearst Poetry Prize at North American Review, and his story “Potomac” received a finalist prize in The Chicago Tribune‘s 2014 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction.”

“Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel is the author of the novels Good News from Outer Space and Corrupting Dr. Nice. His short story collections are Meeting in Infinity, The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence. Kessel’s stories have twice received the Nebula Award given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, in addition to the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Locus Poll, the James Tiptree Jr. Award. In 2009 his story “Pride and Prometheus” received both the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award.”

“I moved to New York City to make my fortune (1982-1985), which I didn’t, though I did work–preposterously, after a lifetime of being picked last for every sport played by humans–as a reporter for Sports Illustrated magazine. I was the NASCAR geek back in the ’80s when no one cared up north about NASCAR. Then, equally unlikely, I went to graduate school at Oxford University (1985-1989) to get something called an M.Phil, a master’s degree which Oxford eliminated soon after I got one. I also lingered two more years to work on a never-completed doctorate: turn-of-the-century travel writings of Henry James in his late manner.”

“My first book, Mattaponi Queen, was published in June 2010 by Graywolf Press. Mattaponi Queen won the Bakeless Prize and the Library of Virginia Award, was short-listed for the 2010 Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, was one of Kirkus Review’s top fiction debuts for 2010, was long-listed for The Story Prize, and was a finalist for the Library of Virginia People’s Choice Award for fiction. My fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Paris Review, Orion, Harper’s, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, the Sun, and the Oxford American, among other publications. My first nonfiction book, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, will be published in September 2016 by Graywolf Press. “

“Vievee Francis is the author of Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), and Forest Primeval (Northwestern University Press, 2016), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. She is an associate professor at Dartmouth College and an associate editor for Callaloo.”

“Karen Leona Anderson grew up in Connecticut. She received an M.F.A from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an M.A. from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and her Ph.D. from Cornell University, where she wrote a dissertation on poetry and science. Her work has appeared in ecopoetics, jubilat, Verse, Indiana Review, Fence,Volt, and The Best American Poetry 2012.”

“Jerry Gabriel’s first book of fiction, Drowned Boy, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and was published in 2010 by Sarabande Books. It was a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” pick and awarded the 2011 Towson Prize for Literature. His stories have appeared in One Story, Epoch, Fiction, Five Chapters, The Missouri Review, failbetter, and Big Fiction, among other publications.”

“Jennifer Cognard-Black, Professor of English, received her B.A. in English and music from Nebraska Wesleyan University, her M.A. in fiction writing from Iowa State University, and her Ph.D. from Ohio State University in nineteenth-century literature and feminist theory. Cognard-Black’s books include Narrative in the Professional Age (Routledge 2004); Kindred Hands (Iowa UP 2006); a writing textbook, Advancing Rhetoric (Kendall/Hunt 2006); and a forthcoming co-edited anthology of food fictions, culinary poems, and recipe recollections, Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal (NYUP 2014). “

“Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the “Elle Lettres” award from Elle Magazine, a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. Marquart is also the author of two poetry collections—Everything’s a Verb and From Sweetness—and a collection of interrelated short stories, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, which draws on her experiences as a female road musician.”

“In 2009, Governor Chet Culver appointed Mary Swander the Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa. Her most recent work is a book of poetry, The Girls on the Roof (Turning Point/Word Tech, 2009), a Mississippi River flood narrative. Ms. Swander received her M.F.A from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She is a professor of English and a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University. She lives in an old Amish schoolhouse, raises geese, goats, and a large organic garden, and plays the banjo.”

“K. L. Cook is the author of three award-winning books of fiction. His most recent book, Love Songs for the Quarantined (Willow Springs Editions 2011), a collection of thematically linked stories, won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and was a Longlist Finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Story Prize. His novel, The Girl from Charnelle (William Morrow 2006/Harper Perennial 2007), won The Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction and was named a Southwest Book of the Year, an Editor’s Choice selection from the Historical Novel Society, and was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Prize, among other honors. Cook’s first book, Last Call (Nebraska 2004), a short story cycle chronicling three decades in the lives of a West Texas family, won the inaugural Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction.”